Teaching at Last

Surviving Week One

This week I finally got started teaching my English classes in Ambato.  The original plan was that I would be teaching two classes of Intermediate II, but the demand for Basic I was so high that I am now teaching one class of Basic I and one class of Intermediate II.  I was bummed at first because having two classes of different levels means I need to make two lesson plans every day instead of one, but after actually spending some time teaching in the classroom I think it will be much more interesting teaching two different classes with different material rather than teaching the same exact thing back to back.  In any case, I am only in the classroom for twenty hours a week so I don't have much of a right to complain about anything related to workload (I'm sure all of my Teach for America friends would agree).

The place I am teaching at is different than the traditional teaching job I was expecting for a number of (mostly welcome) reasons.  Like I mentioned before, the school I am teaching at is not a high school or a university.  It is a trade school that offers English classes and anyone is welcome to enroll regardless of age.  This means that for the most part my students are adults.  I do have a few younger students in my Basic I class that are around fifteen years old, but a majority of them are over eighteen and some are as old as in their forties.

One of my biggest concerns being a teacher was discipline because, believe it or not, kids generally don't find me very intimidating.  I'm not sure if it's my lack of ability to grow facial hair or my open obsession with Pokémon, but they just never seem to respect my authority.  Thankfully because of the age demographics of my classes, discipline has not been a problem so far and I don't predict it being a problem in the future.

Another distinct feature of my job is that there is no curriculum.  The students don't have textbooks and there are no standards for what the students need to learn at each stage of English classes.  This means that I am responsible for choosing what the students will learn and providing the necessary materials to facilitate that learning.  Translation: I make like 200 copies a day of grammar book pages and exercises for my students.

At the beginning, and even after my first week, the idea of being responsible for creating a curriculum for both of my classes has been very intimidating.  Topics and grammar points in language overlap an incredible amount, so trying to figure out which topics are best learned before others and which are appropriate for the different classes at their particular levels is overwhelming.  I was very jealous of the teaching positions of the volunteers in high schools that have curricula already created for them.  They know what they are expected to teach to their students every day and the expectations for the class at the end of the semester are very clear.

This jealousy didn't last long when I heard more about the kinds of things those teachers are required to teach their students.  It is definitely nice that they each have a curriculum laid out for them, but they are also forced to teach some pretty awkward and unimportant vocabulary and grammar points because they appear on the already written exams they are required to administer.  My situation requires me to work more to prepare for classes, but it is completely up to me what to teach and how to evaluate my students.  I think once I get the hang of lesson planning down I will prefer my format and have more fun being in complete control.

The last interesting caveat of my teaching job is the hours.  Each class lasts two and a half hours (!) and I have two a day: 3:45-6:15p.m. and 6:30-9:00pm.  I was concerned about the hours at first because the idea of working until 9:00 at night did not sound very appealing.  However, given my penchant for sleeping until noon and staying up late at night writing blog posts, this schedule has worked well for me so far.  Another bonus is that I only teach Monday through Thursday, so I can go out on Thursday nights and take longer trips on my three-day weekends.

Where Can I Buy a Gallon of Adderol?

Planning for the first day of class I tried to let my own experience in foreign language classrooms guide me.  I remember learning a little bit of grammar, doing some exercises in class, maybe a super awkward speaking or role-playing game, and then the teacher frantically telling us things as we walked out the door because we ran out of time.  Class time was always paired with significant assignments outside of class like writing papers or doing grammar worksheets.

It turns out this format isn't going to work well where I am.  In contrast to my two and a half hours of classroom instruction a week in college, my students are getting ten hours a week.  This means that although each course only lasts ten weeks, they are all receiving 100 hours of classroom instruction, which is a crapload of teacher time when you think about it.  The question now is, what is the best way to fill those 100 hours?

I first wondered how it would even be possible to teach a class for two and a half hours because most people's attention spans are tried after fifty minutes of class.  I had an image in my head of me standing in the front of the classroom teaching grammar for two hours straight every day, with the students falling asleep and preparing to kill themselves if class went another minute longer.  That, or me showing a Lord of the Rings movie every class.

The first decision I made was that there will be very little homework given in my class.  The students are already spending two and a half hours a day in class and a lot of them have full-time jobs during the day.  I don't really expect students to go home and find time to do homework in addition to our class time and their jobs, so I am going to use some of our time everyday to let them do homework-like assignments that I can still grade and give them feedback on.

Even with homework in class, there is still a lot of time left every day.  One thing that I remember clearly from my foreign language learning experience is that the teachers were always running out of time.  I tried to think more about what they always wanted to do and I think I figured it out.  Classes in the U.S. are very grade-centric and if the teachers only have time to evaluate the students on one aspect of language it will always be the most objective and the quickest format: reading and writing.  Speaking with students takes too long and it needs to be done individually.  For a class that only meets for fifty minutes at a time, it is impractical.  It is because of this lack of emphasis on oral production that I am still not an excellent Spanish speaker after eight years of studying Spanish.  It's hard to think of any other area besides foreign language that people can dedicate years to studying and still not be proficient.  It only takes four years to become a doctor, but after eight years of studying Spanish I still have trouble ordering a pizza in Ecuador.

Because of this lack of oral production in class, I am planning on utilizing a large chunk of my class time over the course of the semester to speaking to my students in English and encouraging them to produce in English.  I have already had some success in this aspect in terms of me speaking a lot of English in my classes.

During orientation, one of the suggestions that kept coming up was "only speak English in your classes."  The first time I heard that I laughed because it simply did not seem possible.  In an advanced class, sure.  The students are familiar with all of the common classroom things the teacher says and they have enough vocabulary and grammar to get through class in the target language.  But a Basic I class?  I just tried to imagine what I would have thought if the first day I took a Spanish class the teacher didn't speak a word of English.

I am finding out that when I have two and a half hours to use every class, I can spend a lot of time talking students through things in English.  For example, if I was in an American classroom teaching Spanish 101, I would only probably only have fifty minutes a class.  I would get the class' attention, say the instructions in Spanish, and be faced with an unresponsive class and a ticking clock.  I would maybe try again, but more likely than not I would just give in and say the instructions in English because I wouldn't want to run out of time for the rest of the day's activities.

In my classes I have nothing but time (literally, because the students don't even have books), so I can spend an absurd amount of time drawing pictures and miming to get my point across without using any Spanish.  In the worst case scenario, I can't explain an abstract idea like the rules to a game so I say it to my best student in English and she translates it for the rest of the class.  I still don't speak any Spanish and the students are reminded that I only speak and respond to English in class.

Teaching is Kind of Fun

We all know that learning isn't fun unless you're a nerd, but teaching has been pretty fun for me.  Since I'm the boss of my classes and I teach what I want, I try to play games to practice grammar points and get the students in the mood to learn at 6:30pm after a day at work.

Last week in my Basic I class I taught my students classroom vocabulary.  One of the things we learned in our orientation from other ESL teachers is that giving out lists of vocabulary words with their Spanish equivalents next to them is not a great way to get those words to stick.  A better idea is to have the students make direct connections between the word and what it stands for by bringing things in and physically showing objects to them.  Students also learn vocabulary better when they are using it in context and it is not just a word on a sheet that they read and learn how to spell for the test.

One of the tools WorldTeach offered us is a book filled with different language games.  In one of them, you split the classroom into two teams and give each student a piece of paper with a letter on it.  You point to an object in the room and the students with the letters necessary to spell the word need to run to the front of the classroom and get in the right order to spell it out.  The first team to spell it out correctly wins a point.

It's always hard to tell what kinds of things people will get excited about and what people will just think is stupid (see: the Shake Weight).  I was scared that the students wouldn't really care about the game and just go through the motions, but they were out of control.  They were screaming at each other for screwing up and I witnessed at least three different attempts at cheating to win.  Keep in mind that there was no prize to be won—the students were just having a good time and doing it for the glory of tick marks on the board and maybe a high-five from me after the game.  Also keep in mind that these are not little kids and most of them are over eighteen.  So yeah, I was impressed at how easy it was to get them motivated to learn new vocabulary.

After the game, the losing team was not satisfied with how I refereed the activity and they wanted redemption, so I played another game in which I write eight letters on the board and they need to rearrange them to form as many words with only those letters as they can.  Again, I underestimated how much they would care about this game and what was supposed to be a five minute activity ended up lasting over twenty minutes.  I was planning on giving them three minutes to come up with words because they are only in Basic I and I didn't think they would have that much vocabulary.  After three minutes they were still going at it strong so I let them keep going until I saw they were slowing down.  It turned out that both teams whipped out dictionaries when I wasn't paying attention because they both wrote down ~40 real words (at least five of which I had to look up myself because I had never heard of them).

At the end of class we had ten minutes left still so I told them they could ask me any question they wanted, given that it was delivered in grammatically perfect English.  One of the students immediately asked in Spanish if I was married.  Just like every time one of my students speaks in Spanish, I acted like I didn't understand and they remembered that they needed to say it in English if they wanted a response.  The whole class turned to the student with the best English and they tried together to figure out how to ask me in English.  A few minutes later:

- Teacher, do you have a girlfriend?
- (*looks at watch*) O.K. class, time's up.  See you tomorrow.

My class lost their shit because they wanted an answer, but I told them they will get another shot at it next week so they should practice their questions over the weekend.  It is so funny to see how quickly they learned how to form questions when there was something they really wanted to know.

Duds

I have had a few good teaching moments this past week, but I did not go without a few duds as well.  One of my activities after teaching how to make questions was the game "21 Questions."  I explained it in English, modeled the game in front of the whole class, then began—assuming that literally playing the game in front of them for five minutes before starting would be enough for them to catch on.  Here is how it went:

- O.K. so remember (*points to head*), I am a famous person (Michael Jackson).  First question?
- Teacher, are you a man?
- Yes, I'm a man.  Very good.  Next question.
- Are you a woman?
- Uh, no I'm not a woman.  You need to listen, someone already asked that.  Next question.
- Are you a man?
- No, no, no.  I mean yes I'm a man, but someone already asked that question.  You need to listen (*points to ears*) then ask (*points to mouth*) questions about the celebrity that I am.  Who understands how to play the game and can ask the next question?
- Are you Indian?
- No.  Next question.
- Are you from New York?
- No. (Finally, they are understanding it!)  Next question.
- Is your name Krishna?
- Jesus Christ!  I'm a celebrity, CE-LE-BRI-TY!  Like Bratt Pitt or Jennifer Lopez, a famous person.  You are not asking questions about me!  (*Points to student with the best English*) Please explain the rules in Spanish to the class.
- O.K.  Él es un personaje, y estamos intentando adivinar quien es.  Pues, él es alguien famoso y tenemos que hacerle preguntas de "sí o no" para averiguar quien es.  (*the entire class sighs in apparent comprehension*).
- Great, thank you.  Now, who wants to ask the first question?
- Teacher, do you like music?
- (*facedesk*)  We are now going to play a game called Hangman.

Next week I'll share the story about my attempt to teach past progressive by listening to "Just a Friend" by Biz Markie.